As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been leveling my priest up to level 80. Having stepped down from leading the optional 10 man raids on our off nights, I now have all this free time again! In this free time, I’ve pulled Earenn out of her hiatus and perma-position in Dalaran as my enchanter. I’ve had some interesting experiences with her so far, so I thought that I’d share!

My current state in priesthood has me at level 76. For 76 levels I have been shadow, and for 76 levels I have remained a terrible shadow priest. No, seriously! I’m not making this up! It makes leveling a snap, sure, but I just cannot get the grip of shadow priesting. I’m so terribly horrid at it that I’ve thought about completely dropping the spec altogether on her once I reach 80.

I have paired back up with Brade’s warrior. Brade has a very…er, set way of leveling. He’s got his patterns, and is basically a machine. While it means he can reach max level very quickly, it also means that sometimes he forgets I’m tagging along and leaves me bumbling along on my own. And let’s be honest here, most of the time that is exactly what I am relegated to…the sidekick that can’t keep up and is always getting into trouble. Sometimes it’s highly annoying to feel like I’m constantly just chasing him down. But, because I can effectively melt faces on my own, it’s less troublesome than before because I don’t feel dependant on someone else to kill my shit.

I have a few other irks that I have about the priest, none of which are actually related to priesting! Actually they are all related to the BoA heirloom items…that I’m not eligible to use! Even though I have 4 other 80s to my name, because my priest is on my second account I do not have access to the heirloom goodness that would be available to me otherwise. I’ve had a number of people in the guild go “just pay and transfer her to your other account!”. Well, I don’t want to and I shouldn’t have to! I mean, my accounts are merged on Battle.net. They log in under the same log in, why can’t I just send my priest items like I can all my other twinks?!?!

Ok…I know why, and I know that I’ve read that they are hoping to have BoA items available to linked Battle.net accounts at some point in the future, but it doesn’t take the pain of having to run around everywhere again away! Or is it really that painful?

One of the things I did with Earenn was to avoid as much of the content that I’ve already done numerous times as I could. I still had to do one of the starter zones (I opted for Howling Fjord), but after that I was free to take my pick of a number of areas to continue my journey. I left Howling Fjord just under 73, but instead of going to Borean Tundra (zzzz) or Dragonblight, I opted instead to partake in the questing in Grizzly Hills again. I’d only done the zone once on Beru, and it really is a beautiful place to quest.

Of course…there are those who would say “it’s a horribly inefficient place to level, especially without being able to fly”. But to those I say…I really enjoyed it! I got to take in the atmosphere as it was meant to be, it was a chance for me to stop and smell the roses, if you will. Sure, I could have leveled with more speed somewhere else, but I wouldn’t have been able to run through to woods, and enjoy much of the rich lore that Grizzly Hills present. We actually made it through all of the Grizzly Hills content on Saturday, taking a bit of a lacsidasical, play when we want, approach. We are now tackling Zul’drak, another lovely zone, full of lore, that I’ve only done once as well.

So…on second thought, perhaps I rescind my complains about not being able to fly around everywhere already!

Because it’s very easy to find groups, even for leveling instances, with a tank and a healer combo, I have a discipline off-spec. I shoot shiny beams of light at things, I give them glowing orbs of love, and I throughly enjoy myself! I really am enjoying the spec immensely, and the healing is a lot of fun. Actually, more fun than I thought it would be. I am also infinitely better at it than I am at melting faces. Yes, that is right. Yellow Lazor Beams > Purple Lazor Beams! *ahem*

Behold the Failpug

Of course…no leveling story would be complete without a recounting of a failpug adventure, and this one is dedicated to Tamarind.

Because Brade has the BoA items that up his XP, he is almost a full level ahead of me. As a result, I try to run instances when I can if he is busy doing something else, to try to catch up on some of the XP. Generally this is done via PuG, and generally it’s not so bad. This past weekend Brade wanted to finish up the new Robert Jordan book that had come out during the week, so I was left to my own devices. I had decided to join the LFG channel and look for a Drak’Tharon Keep PuG, since I hadn’t done the instance yet.

Sure enough, after not too long, I was asked if I wanted to join a group for the zone, to which I happily replied that I would love to! I joined in the group, and was the lowest one there at level 73, but of the 4 of us was the only party capable of healing. I figured that I’d be healing and they would pick up a 5th DPS, and we’d be on our way. Alas…that isn’t quite how it worked out. The fifth member that was picked up was another priest, level 76, who was only discipline.

The leader asked me if I would mind DPSing, to which I warned him that I would probably be poor DPS and was a bit low to DPS the bosses, but had no issues giving it a whirl. So off we went to the instance.

We wiped twice in the first 5 pulls of the zone. After this point, I spent more time helping heal that I did melting faces, just so that we wouldn’t wipe again. I noticed that this priest cast exclusively flash heal. Curious, I inspected him to see how he was speced, and noticed that he did, in fact, have the last tier discipline talent, penance. Oddly enough, he didn’t have the 3 talent points that increased the power of flash heal.

Finding it odd that he didn’t cast penance once, or PW:Shield once, after our next wipe I shot him a quick (what I felt was friendly) tell asking him “Have you thought about trying Pennacnce?”. His response led me to frett about the success we were going to have in the zone, “why would I, my flash heals heal for more”. Uh…what? I assumed that he didn’t understand that penance consists of a number of ticks, but is all considered one heal. So I try to explain to him how it works, and why he might want to experiment with using it.

“You don’t know what ur talking about my flash heal heals for 8k”. Seesh! “Well, I’m just trying to give you some pointers where it seems you are struggling a bit to help, you don’t have to take them if you don’t want”. “Who says I’m struggling?!!?”

At this point, I probably should have just shut my yap. I wasn’t trying to be a know it all, honest. I was just trying to save him…and anyone he groups with in the future a lot of wiping. I also wasn’t trying to tell him how to play, just attempting to give him gentle encouragement in the proper direction. So, I politely responded to him “Well, the two wipes where you didn’t use anything but flash heal, and no shields, would indicate that maybe you could use a few more of the spells in your tool kit to your success”. I really think the guy was a 14 year old kid. This was solidified by his next actions.

It was certainly not my intent to chase the kid off. I was really just trying to help him out :( I had thought that I made proper suggestions, in a polite way, not forcing it on him but trying to open the door to the thought process that goes “ohhhhhhh…is THAT what that spell does and/or is for?!”. Alas…I failed.

But, I mean…c’mon! If you don’t want advice, at least make a little effort to learn what your class can do. I am certainly not claiming to be any sort of paragon of priest healing, and I am more than aware that I am still learning, but I at least make an effort to know what my shit does! Why, dear god, would you spec into something and then not even know how it works?!?! Why would you not make an effort to play with all of the tools that you have? All it would take is one shield for “Borrowed Time” to pop up. The first time it happened to me, I was like, “huh…I wonder what this does” and went and read the tool tip! All it took was one time for grace to pop up on the tank for me to wonder how it got there so that I could make it happen again!

*sigh*

At this point, the party leader asked me if I’d mind healing to which I said not at all. Although it’s not as if I had a choice…after having run off their other healer. The rest of the run went smoothly, and we didn’t have another wipe for the remainder of the instance. As I was leaving I apologized about having run the first guy off, but they all admitted that they were glad he left, as they didn’t think we would have gotten very far with him. I guess this made me feel marginally better. Kinda.

I learned three things this night. 1) Help offered, no matter how polite, isn’t always help well received; 2) Disc Priests can heal almost anything, no matter how bad the tank/group may be; and 3) Priest 76 had just shot himself in the foot as far as I was concerned, I won’t group with him again if he is healing, and I certainly hope he doesn’t get it into his mind to app to my guild upon reaching 80. Yes priest 76…I will remember you!

One response to “Laser Bubbles – Adventures in Priesting”

Failpug is why people don’t give out advice at endgame. Simple fear of an emo nerdrage gquit.

It’s ridiculous.

If someone offered me random advice for my spec or rotation, I’d ask my husband what he thought and see if he agreed. He’s in charge of those things for me (I may not care about gear or research, but I at least know who does).

You may have been completely wrong (you weren’t), but he could have accepted your words and checked your facts later if he thought he was right. He even could have said “I realize you’re trying to help, but your advice feels like criticism. I’ll check up on penance later, if that’s okay, and stick to flash heals for now.”

Instead, he ran off like an emo brat.

I’m sorry you had to deal with him. WoW needs more constructive criticism, and guys like him make people give less.

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